Jamie Foxx's Django experience

January 20th, 2013

Jamie Foxx used his own racial abuse to fuel his 'Django Unchained' role.

The actor - who plays a freed slave in the Quentin Tarantino-directed film - was impressed by the unnerving grit in the film's script and channelled his own experiences with racial abuse as a youth to get into character.

He explained: ''It was the most incredible script I've read in all my life. I thought, 'Who has the guts to tell it like it really is?' The way [Quentin] tells the story, it rips your flesh off.

''When I met Quentin, the first thing I told him was about my experiences. As a kid growing up in Texas, there were some things where the racial component was definitely elevated. So I told him those experiences are going to come out when we start shooting this movie.

''When a project becomes magic and special it means that at certain points in the script it parallels your story.''

While Jamie, 45, identified with the role and felt an emotional connection with the slaves of the antebellum era, he also wanted his daughters - Corinne, 18, and Annalise, four - to experience what it was like to be a slave by having them visit the film set's slave quarters.

He told Scout London magazine: ''You can't walk through those places and not feel something. I let them walk through and I said, 'This is where you come from.' ''